‘We need urgent measures’“There is no question that bonobos are seriously threatened,” Guabini said, speaking over a shrill forest symphony of birds, animals and insects. “We need urgent measures or there is no way we can protect the species.”

But for poor villagers, bonobos can be lucrative business, with much of the meat heading for expensive, clandestine meals at restaurants in the cities.

One bonobo can earn $200 for Richard Ipaka, a 50-year-old part-time poacher who lives in the provincial capital, Mbandaka.

“That’s enough money for two months,” he said.

Like many Congolese, he said he did not know bonobos are found in the wild only in his country. And like many others, he was skeptical that the ape is endangered.

“Our ancestors have been eating bonobos for centuries. How could they disappear?” Ipaka said.

But the peace-loving bonobos are increasingly difficult to sight, and not just because they’re good at hiding, suspended from the high branches of trees or swiftly traversing the lattice of thick, muddy roots strewn over the forest floor.

The best place to glimpse them these days may be the Bonobo Paradise sanctuary in Congo’s capital, Kinshasa, which is home to a few dozen rescued from poachers by police.

Poachers have devised an array of methods to bag bonobos.

Hunters in Congo’s Equator province say the apes are most easily captured when asleep drunk, so poachers intoxicate them with beer and palm wine. The dazed bonobos are stuffed in bags and carted off to local markets.

Killed with poisoned meat
Other poachers use guns, and some leave poisoned meat in the forest, silently killing packs of up to 20 bonobos at a time.

Ipaka, who uses a battle-worn Kalashnikov assault rifle to shoot bonobos sleeping in their nests, said he hunts most often with bands of unemployed militiamen left over from a string of rebellions, coups and conflict that ravaged Congo beginning in the mid-1990s.